


we're not us anymore (common tongue)

by Veridique



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Bilingual Character(s), F/M, Rough Sex, Smut, Title from a Hozier Song, mild teenage sexuality, not-so-mild adult sexuality, title from a Halestorm song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:07:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26711155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veridique/pseuds/Veridique
Summary: As the cool night breeze begins to bite through his coat, he realizes he’s been standing stock-still in the street for ten minutes and eighteen seconds staring at a pale wood home with an iron door knocker, and the knots in his stomach have only wound themselves tighter.Jetzt oder nie,he thinks.Now or never.Caleb visits Astrid at her home in Rexxentrum. One thing leads to another.
Relationships: Astrid/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	we're not us anymore (common tongue)

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost, I want to apologize to the friend who was delighted to hear that I was writing a Caleb fic; I'm pretty sure this isn't what you were expecting.
> 
> Second, thank you to parttimehuman for helping me with some of the ~~German~~ Zemnian. Any errors are entirely my own.
> 
> Inspired by the Halestorm song "Apocalyptic."
> 
> Did I title two fics in a row after the same Hozier song? Yes, yes I did.

He’s only half-conscious of his bodily sensations as he walks: the cobblestone streets of Rexxentrum against his shoes, the faint lights of evening lanterns, the faint rumble in his stomach as his body recalls the dinner that his mind forgot to eat. He had distracted himself with Halas’s texts for as long as he could, a distraction as fine as any he's known. But now he isn’t distracted; he’s crossing the old familiar streets of the capitol with deliberate intention. He asks for no directions and makes no wrong turns; even without his perfect memory, he couldn’t forget this route if he wanted to.

(He’s wanted to, many times, and he isn’t sure whether or not he’s grateful to remember it now.)

As the cool night breeze begins to bite through his coat, he realizes he’s been standing stock-still in the street for ten minutes and eighteen seconds staring at a pale wood home with an iron door knocker, and the knots in his stomach have only wound themselves tighter. _Jetzt oder nie,_ he thinks. _Now or never._

He knocks. He’s let in. He sits in the parlor, observing the blue sofa _(he wonders if blue is still her favorite color)_ and the table by the window _(she liked to sip her tea in the morning sunlight)_ and the vaguest hint of an uncomfortably sweet fragrance in the air.

_She always smelled like flowers._

\--

Her lips don’t taste like flowers the first time he kisses her, and he’s almost surprised. He would have been surprised, if it weren’t for the surplus of surprise he was experiencing about everything else related to _Astrid’s kissing me._

He doesn’t have time to be surprised by the lack of lilacs on her lips.

She pulls back, almost bashful, eyes worried. “Is that okay, Bren?” she asks him, surprising him even more by speaking in Zemnian. He knew she spoke it, from an occasional muttered _Scheiße_ under her breath when she caught an error in her notes. But they’d never spoken it to each other. Master Ikithon introduced them to one another in Common, and so Common they spoke.

Until now.

Of course, until now, she didn’t press her body against his and part her lips. Until now, he wasn’t aware of the quiet hunger that rolled in his abdomen when he touched her. She was his colleague, his schoolmate, his friend, nothing more. Until now.

“ _Ja,_ ” he tells her, and the smile that spreads on her face draws his attention back to her lips, and how much he wants to figure out what it was they tasted like, if not flowers.

\--

“Let’s speak in our regular tongue,” he says to her in Zemnian, and he expects it to feel familiar. Standing in front of her, he wants his voice to sound like it did when he was seventeen. But it doesn’t. It sounds like a man’s voice, no longer a boy’s, no longer tinged with the righteous zeal with which they three children marched off to war.

He’s older now. 

“Of course,” she replies, and he can see that she’s older now, too. A new scar crosses her face, and buried somewhere deep within him, Bren Ermendrud wants to hunt down whatever bastard hurt her. But Caleb Widogast knows that Astrid almost certainly returned the gesture and then some, and part of him even feels a bit of pity for the poor soul whose last sight in this world was Astrid’s bloody face.

As they talk, he’s both agonizingly aware of their conversation, aware that each word Astrid says will be burned perfectly into his brain for the next month, and also strangely dissociated from the entire situation. It’s not until he brings up the sanatorium, until he manages to croak out the question that’s been rattling around in his skull for years, that he suddenly feels like he is all too present in this all-too-small room.

“We took you there,” Astrid tells him. He doesn’t ask whether “we” includes just herself and Wulf, or if _someone else_ was responsible as well. “You had a breaking point and understandably, began to lash out. Part of that same spark that was seen in you could create a lot of sparks everywhere else.”

She reaches up to scratch her neck, and her fingers pull at the collar of her blouse. There’s a discoloration of her skin that makes Caleb lean in closer, and Astrid pulls the collar farther down her shoulder, eyes never leaving him.

Burn scars. Pink and brown and mottled and tight, all across her neck and shoulder. She pulls her shirt down far enough that he can make out the top of her breast, but he can’t see the end of the scarring. He looks down at his hands, as if he can see the blood on them.

But that’s just silly. Burns don’t bleed.

“For your own good, we took care of you and we brought you there,” she tells him, releasing her shirt collar. “But we had to subdue you first.”

He’s glad to not remember that.

\--  
He knows he’s stronger than her. He may not look like much compared to Wulf, but compared to the child who entered Master Ikithon’s instruction, his body has changed immensely. He carries himself differently now, in this space between boy and man.

Astrid, a year older, is just past the point where she’s more woman than girl. And although she’s grown since he met her, and although she carries herself differently, too, he knows that he could restrain her anywhere he wanted with hardly a sweat.

And that’s why he’s so gentle with her, as he lays her down on his bed. He touches her face like a china doll, kisses her like his lips might break her skin.

“I want this, Bren,” she says breathily.

“I want this, too.”

“You can act like it.” At his confused look, she continues, “You don’t have to handle me like I’m about to chicken out. Touch me like you mean it.”

He applies the barest breath more pressure to her chest, and she almost laughs.

“Like you _mean it,_ Bren.”

But he can’t. The idea that he might accidentally put too much pressure on her, that his not-quite-confidence in his not-quite-a-man’s body might go too far and cause harm to Astrid...it’s unthinkable. 

Unfortunately, Bren has always been too good at thinking to turn his mind off now.

\--  
“I think I’d better go,” he says, and he really ought to. 

Against his better judgment, though, he raises his hand to her cheek and traces his thumb down the raised scar across her face. “Too many scars.” 

“I regret none of them,” she says quickly. Then, more slowly, she amends her statement: “Except one.”

His hand is in her hair before he knows what he’s doing. He pulls her in, close enough so that he can’t see her neck or her arms or even her face, close enough that he can forget the scars and pretend they’re both teenagers again.

_Jetzt oder nie._

He kisses her.

She must have been expecting it, with how quickly she responds, and how positively. Her teeth nip at his lips as she twists her head away from his hand. He tightens his grip to pull her hair, and her mouth opens even wider against his as she moans. She lets herself fall into his lap on the couch, and he grabs her body to pull her closer. His nails dig in, a little more rough than romantic.

Gods, he’s missed this. He’s missed _her._ Her scent and the feel of her skin are just as intoxicating as they always were, but now there’s the extra element of the decade and a half of age passed for each of them, the years her body has aged when he hasn’t had a chance to watch it.

“Is your man discreet?” he whispers.

“We can go upstairs if you want.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“What are you asking, then?” She speaks between hot, fast kisses sucked into his neck. “If ripping my clothes off in the parlor will make my servants question my authority?”

“I’m not asking about ripping your clothes off.” His hand digs into the curve of her ass. “I’m asking about throwing you against the wall and taking you.”

He speaks with confidence, with certainty, as if Astrid is indeed his for the taking. As if she doesn’t already belong to someone else. 

The confidence is, of course, feigned. Caleb has stolen one of Ikithon’s students before, but he doesn’t think he’ll get away with a second abduction.

“Upstairs,” she says, with a wicked smile. She stands, pulling him up by the front of his shirt as she does. Not looking behind her to make sure he’s following, she moves quickly, not-quite-running, towards the short staircase leading to the upper floor of the split-level home.

He follows, of course, his longer legs covering two steps to every three of Astrid’s. The short staircase has eight stairs, and he pays attention to this because of how he’s mesmerized by the swinging of her hips as she climbs the stairs. Her trousers are well fitted around her hips, and he can hardly think of anything but how badly he wants to rip them off.

As soon as he sees the bed, as soon as he knows which direction to go, he’s done following Astrid’s lead. He shoves her from behind onto the bed, knocking the frame against the wall with a painfully satisfying _thunk_. Her sudden gasp makes him increasingly conscious of the growing pressure in his trousers. He’s on top of her quickly, one hand grasping at her hair again, the other pawing at the buttons of her blouse.

She helps, and once the buttons are unfastened, Caleb’s hands and teeth rip the shirt away from her body. He flings his coat on the floor on top of it, and his tunic follows soon after. 

He’s hungry. Hungry for her body, for her touch, for the pull of her fingers on his flesh and the heat of her skin on his lips as he kisses down her torso. 

He’s been touch-starved before, before he met the Nein, and especially before he met Nott. He remembers how nice it felt to sleep beside her, their two bodies cuddled together for warmth and security in the midst of a cold, cruel world. How comforting it felt to be touched in a way that wasn’t a slap or a kick from a tavern keeper when Caleb had overstayed his welcome past last call.

But this isn’t that. If Jester’s healing words and Caduceus’ big bear hugs are the warmth of a mushroom stew cooked over a hearth, then this…

This is _meat._

This is a wolf’s jaws tearing into a raw, bloody kill. 

This is satiating the basest of animal needs. He does not think; he does not reason. He _consumes._

Astrid’s mouth is sucking against his neck. He leans into her, and if she uses her teeth a little more liberally than she did at eighteen, well, Caleb Widogast is a bit sturdier than Bren Ermendrud was. He relishes the pain, to the point where he can’t be silent anymore, and when she pulls back at his cry of pain, he hardly recognizes the voice that growls at her. “Don’t. Stop.”

It hurts, sure. But at this point, it would hurt worse to walk away.

\--

There are words he can’t say in Common.

There are gaps in translation, of course, information that, once encoded, cannot be recoded without changing what's been said.

But even short of words that just don’t translate, there are words that belong only to Zemnian.

“I love you,” for instance. He’s never loved anyone in Common. He learned Common as a second language growing up, but the language he spoke with his parents in their home was Zemnian. He did his chores in Zemnian and helped his mother cook and his father chop wood in Zemnian, and he sought and earned his parents’ praise, all in Zemnian. Even though they all spoke it, there was no Common in his family’s love.

In Common, he and Astrid are schoolmates, partners in study. He admires her in Common, and he enjoys her company. 

But loving her happens in Zemnian.

 _Er liebt sie_ when he’s kissing the calluses of her fingers. _Er liebt sie_ when her hand runs across his bare chest, making him shudder.

In the presence of Master Ikithon, or anyone else in the world, he can say “I like Astrid,” in Common.

But when they’re alone, it’s always _ich liebe dich._

\--

Panting, he pushes himself off of her and rolls onto his back, lying beside her on the luxurious bed. She’s breathing hard, too, and it looks as though her deep, heaving breaths hurt her a little, because she shudders periodically as they both catch their breaths.

Maybe it hurts. Maybe she’s still coming off the high of her climax. Probably, Caleb thinks as he reflects on his ferocity, it’s both.

Years ago, he would have been gasping _ich liebe dich_ as their bodies returned to a resting state. It was always the only thing he could think to say after they made love, his brain a garbled mess in which the only thing that made sense was his feelings for her.

But he looks at her, still gasping for breath, and he looks at his own body, covered in fresh red marks that will be purple bruises tomorrow morning, and he knows that what they have done is, by no possible definition, making love.

“Will you stay the night?” she asks, after a while, and he almost says yes. He almost falls asleep to the sound of her breathing and the scent of her soft hair.

But if he stays tonight, he’ll stay tomorrow morning. And he’ll stay and stay and then he can picture Trent's face, so proud of Astrid for bringing their lost sheep back to the fold.

He has to leave. Now or never.

“I can’t,” he says in Common. “I have friends. They’re waiting.”

He has no clue if any of them are waiting, or even how many have noticed he’s gone. But the switch to Common is enough to tell Astrid that their one last night is over.

He dresses, unable to look at her. He doesn’t say goodbye, just gathers his things and pushes his way out of her bedroom, downstairs, back out into the streets of Rexxentrum.

It was stupid, he knows. Stupid to relive the fantasy of making love to Astrid, as if they were still the children that Ikithon found all those years ago.

Caleb Widogast heads back home, pulling his coat collar up over his neck and leaving Bren Ermendrud to shiver in the street.


End file.
